chubbs

Here is a chart from the paper I linked above. Three separate satellite measurements in close agreement - 40 years of data. Note brightness temperature is a measure of relative humidity.

2 hours ago, blizzard1024 said:

Thank you.  I appreciate that.  Just because someone has a difference in scientific opinion doesn't mean you should be nasty to them. This really shouldn't be tolerated on this forum.

I follow the work of Lindzen, Curry, Spencer, and Christy all smart PhDs. I agree with their viewpoints and their uncertainties. I am not a climate change "denier". I just don't think that CO2 is as dominate in the climate system as mainstream climatologists think. An ECS of between 1C and 2C for doubling is pretty much where I stand. I don't see the doomsday scenarios. I also am concerned about the water vapor feedback not being as strong as modeled. I don't like that ERA5 is inconsistent in its specific humidity in the lower atmosphere and that it is so well correlated to temperature at high levels. This is a problem to me. It really all depends on how strong the water vapor feedback is and if that can be proven with REAL data,  not models, I then will accept higher ECS. Anyway, take care and thanks for being professional in your response. 

 

 

 

Reposting chart from 2019 AMS climate report. There is REAL data. Two separate and independent satellite measurements: infared (HIRS) and microwave. Also, relinking the paper which showed that satellite upper troposphere humidity data is in good agreement. The data is there if you really want to partake.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2015JD024496

26 minutes ago, blizzard1024 said:

What about ocean currents?  What about global cloud cover? What about global convection? You left off a bunch of stuff. That is why they invoke the use of climate models. But these models don't handle said clouds or convection explicitly. So it is a leap of faith to believe them....

You are the one invoking models, because you can't explain why it is warming. The temperature increase matches man-made forcing to a T. Ocean currents. cloud cover, convection etc. could not have had a large impact, they just move energy around in the system.

The chart below was made from forcing estimates and observed temperatures. No climate model.

https://www.globalwarmingindex.org/

10 hours ago, blizzard1024 said:

I respectfully disagree here. How do they know? Climate models do not have this level of precision to make such claims.  If you believe the models yes, you are correct. I am skeptical of atmospheric models especially ones that don't forecast convection or clouds explicitly. 

That mamade forcing swamps natural since 1950 doesn't rely on climate models.  Here are the 1950-->2015 forcing estimates (W/m2):

Manmade: 1.90

Natural: -0.09 (mainly solar)

Total 1.81

https://github.com/Priestley-Centre/ssp_erf

1 hour ago, blizzard1024 said:

Seriously?  You have got to be kidding me. You have a highly non-linear dynamical climate system with clouds, and convection and a one to one relationship between temperature and specific humidity at high levels in the troposphere and you compare this to something simple like gravity?  Shows a deep lack of understanding of atmospheric science.... 

The evidence is overwhelming. Scientists predicted water vapor feedback before models existed. All models with non-linear dynamics have it, and now it is measured by satellites and present in re-analysis. What more do you want? 

1 hour ago, blizzard1024 said:

ERA5 reanalysis data specific humidities, q, at 500, and 300 mb show almost a 1:1 correlation with temperature.  200 mb q looks like 500 and 300 mb but the temperature trends are contaminated by the fact that 200 mb is in the stratosphere farther north and south on the globe and especially in the winter months (both hemispheres). So the cooling of the lower stratosphere offsets some of the warming in the upper troposphere and there is no temperature trend at all. But 500 and 300 mb are pretty much wholy in  the troposphere. 500 mb looks similar. Look at 850 mb...

 

But for some strange reason, the 850 mb temperature and specific humidities decline from the late 1970s to around 2000 and then increase. If anywhere in the atmosphere there should be a nearly 1:1 correlation it IS at 850 mb because warmer(colder) temperatures leads to more(less) evaporation off the oceans and land since 850 mb is well within the diurnal convective mixed layer. Once you get above 700 mb, you are well above the mixed layer for most of the planet. So at 500, and 300 mb a 1:1 correlation looks fishy. There is no mechanism that would describe this very short term strong correlation that I could think of except global convection. If the temperature increases at 300 mb for instance, yes it CAN support more water vapor but some mechanism has to get the water vapor up there. Conversely at 850 mb, there IS a mechanism that explains why more warmth = more water vapor,  it is insolation and convective mixing. So this ERA5 data is either suspect IMO in the lower troposphere and is more likely is showing increased global convection causing more water vapor at high levels. This would not be proof that there is a long term positive feedback as has been described by many authors. In many respects NCEPs reanalysis data does show increasing water vapor at the lower levels up to 600 mb and then decreasing water vapor above. This actually makes more sense in the low-levels because of the warming planet and more evaporation. Precipitation processes and enhanced convection would eventually lead to drying in the upper troposphere and a negative feedback. Radiosondes also show this too of which I believe NCEP uses in their reanalysis data. The fact that the NASA NVAP satellite retrieval data showed drying upper troposphere too until 2001 (data never released to 2009) which agreed with the radiosondes also suggests NCEPs data could be more accurate. In any event, I wish I could see the AIRs datasets which supposedly support the positive feedback but I wonder if they would show the same thing as ERA5. A while back, I read from Spencer and Christy a criticism of AIRS (I can't find it yet, I believe it was a blog post) that there is a lot of difficulty in retrievals of water vapor due to clouds and even radiances from temperatures at high levels. I wonder if that also is why this ERA5 data looks suspect. In any event, it is far from certain that there is a significantly positive water vapor feedback. That is a reasonable statement IMO based on the data so far.

You are twisting yourself up into a pretzel. Water vapor feedback is almost like gravity. Well supported by theory and observations. The satellite obs show moistening in the upper troposphere, if anything upper troposphere moistening is faster than predicted by climate models due to moisture increases in the dry subtropics. Per paper below ERA5 is better than other re-analysis products at matching satellite upper troposphere moisture obs.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2015JD024496

40 minutes ago, blizzard1024 said:

Don't they have specific humidity?  Plus this is a reanalysis dataset. It is nice to see another dataset and I thank you but where did you get this from? I would like to explore it.  Thanks

Plots were made at KNMI Climate Explorer

Here is 200mb data from the ERA5 re-analysis:

200mb heights have increased - the atmosphere is expanding as it warms

200mb temperatures at the higher heights have increased

200mb humidity is constant

So yes upper troposphere water vapor is increasing as expected

Saw this chart on twitter (PW is petawatts which is estimated by taking forcing per meter squared times surface area of earth). There is a very close relationship between forcing changes and global temperature. Now that data has been updated, can see that the hiatus and subsequent temperature spike are mainly due to short-term forcing changes. Not much room for natural variation.

6 minutes ago, blizzard1024 said:

Now 400 mb would have more of an effect as shown here. BUT you can easily see the ENSO signature which suggests the moistening is more from El Ninos and less from overall warming. You can't separate out the two. El Ninos lead to more tropical convection which moistens and heats the upper troposphere. 400 mb is not quite upper troposphere but it would easily be heated and moistened by said convection.  This is basic radiative transfer. 

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. Comments: 1) rising temperature due to forcing has swamped ENSO effects, 2) Doesn't matter why warming occurred, warming temperatures have lead to increased moisture in the upper layers of the troposphere. The distribution is just as expected with biggest increase in areas with strong convection.

4 minutes ago, blizzard1024 said:

Please explain. It is well known that it is upper tropospheric water vapor that is the most important when it comes to the Greenhouse effect. Why do you think they criticize NCEPs specific humidity?  It does show rises in the lower troposphere but declines in the very dry upper troposphere. There was a peer reviewed paper that looked at this very effect and found a constant greenhouse effect based on NCEPs dataset of water vapor showing declines in the upper troposphere. This paper has been ignored because scientists don't believe NCEPs dataset showing declining upper tropospheric water vapor.  I know I am correct on this, it is the upper troposphere that counts for the greenhouse effect. CO2 does nothing in the lower and even mid-troposphere, it is the high levels where it counts. This is fundamental. 

Per the discussion 20 pages ago. NCEP is an older re-analysis product. Newer products like ERA5 have corrected errors and show increasing upper troposphere moisture. What is the point of providing you with additional information? The data and theory is all very consistent. Temperature is rising, moisture is rising, just as expected. Would take a large non-linearity for moisture to not increase as temperature increases. Note that this would cascade into precipitation and clouds.

HM had a series of tweets on tropical moisture and Atlantic hurricanes. For the area he looked at moisture increased at all levels of the atmosphere. Why wouldn't it? Temperature controls atmospheric moisture and temperature is increasing at all levels of the troposphere.

10 hours ago, blizzard1024 said:

It's not CO2 entirely.CO2 always lags T in ice cores. It never drove the climate in the last 2.6 million years with the present ocean currents and geography. Why would it all of the sudden change?  That's not physics. There is more to the climate system and we just don't understand enough about natural processes. But we shouldn't be polluting our atmosphere, so in the long run we need to go to renewables and cleaner energy sources. CO2 is a weak GHG. That is basic physics. The feedbacks can't be significantly positive or our climate would have gone off the rails a long time ago and it simply didn't. You need major positive feedbacks and high climate sensitivity. The observations are not showing this. If you pick warm biased data sources you get 2C per century or so. UAH is 1.4C per century. So split the difference... 1.5C to 2.0C increase over 1880 leads to another .5C to 1C for a doubling CO2 assuming the climate was in stasis in the 1800s. This is a BAD assumption since we were coming out of a global LIA. It is very possible that much of the 20th century warming is natural with some smaller CO2 component. Climate models are tuned to be sensitive to CO2 and have positive feedbacks which in nature likely doesn't exist. See Spencer's work on ERBE satellite data.  Anyway, I am done. I don't buy your CAGW. It is hype.  I see modest warming. I am finished here.  You got your wish. No dissenters, no debate. No learning.  Have a nice life. 

Just repeating your talking points. Scientists have looked at this for a long time. They use models, a wide range of observations, and other quantitative procedures, not hand waving or talking points from junk science blogs. Climate science predictions have been spot on for decades. CO2 and other non-condensible GHG control the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Very simple physics, backed up by reams of data.

Here is UAH vs RSS+Hadcrut for land temperatures. UAH missed more than 0.2C of warming between 1998 and 2008, mainly due to dropping NOAA14. Land temperatures chosen because that is where satellite diurnal drift errors are most noticeable.

https://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah6-land/mean:12/plot/crutem4vgl/last:480/mean:12/offset:-0.3/plot/rss-land/mean:12

38 minutes ago, blizzard1024 said:

Yes it is when you pick a cold decade starting point. Look before that. It was warmer. That is cherry picking IMO. 

1970 is when the big forcing ramp started as aerosol's stabilized while GHG took off. So you are saying that GHG do control climate

21 minutes ago, blizzard1024 said:

Here's NCAR/NCEP reanalysis graph of daily/monthly anomalies based on a 1994-2013 average period. It also confirms UAH .43C and modest warming. August was about .175 or so above the 1994-2013 average period which is lower because UAH uses 1981-2010 which has a lower mean. In the end, not much going on that suggests extreme warming. Two different datasets. 

NCEP had a roughly 0.2C cooling bias vs other re-analysis products between Nov+Mar this year. CFS below shows we are running about the same as last year despite the developing La Nina. The 0.2C bias in NCEP is about the same as the warming that uah missed due to dropping NOAA-14.

Per the paper below there is a slight reduction in OHC during El Nino due to heat loss from ocean to atmosphere.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331751587_Evolution_of_Ocean_Heat_Content_Related_to_ENSO

20 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

.87. Small typo on my part, but a huge problem were the mistyped figure accurate.

The climate system doesn't like to be so far out of equilibrium. There are two ways to get back into balance: reduce ghg, or increase temperature. CO2 forcing in 2019 was 2.076 W/m2. To eliminate, the current 0.87 W/m2 imbalance using CO2 alone, would need to reduce CO2 to 1987 levels when CO2 forcing was 1.211 W/m2 and CO2 concentrations were 348 ppm. 350 ppm was Hanson's safe level, that is roughly the climate we are experiencing today. Per tweet below need roughly 1C of warming to stabilize temperatures with the current atmosphere. We have only experienced about half the warming that our current atmosphere would allow.

CO2 forcing estimates from:

https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi.html

A couple of comments:

1) ice core timing has uncertainty. There is some air exchange as snow accumulates before ice is formed. Recent papers have found the CO2 and temperature changes are closely aligned. https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/8/1213/2012/cp-8-1213-2012.html; https://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6123/1060.abstract

2) Can't explain ice core temperature changes in the S Hemisphere without CO2 since summer insolation trends are opposite in S vs N hemisphere

3) As pointed out above can't get magnitude of ice ages without a CO2 forcing contribution. Note if CO2 is contributing nothing, this means climate is more sensitive, since forcing change is roughly 50% smaller without CO2.

4) A recent paper has found temperature change to the last glacial maximum was larger than previously thought producing a larger climate sensitivity estimate. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2617-x

6 hours ago, blizzard1024 said:

Thanks for the papers Chubbs. Where can I find the latest specific humidity q for the upper troposphere from these other datasets?  This is really needed. It assess the greenhouse effect in real-time. More q at 300 mb worldwide means more warming. Why is NCEP the only dataset available? I can see NCEPII also. But none of these other datasets are easily available. I would love to see a real-time comparison.   Also where can I look at the AIRs data curves for q at 300 mb?  NVAP is available until 2001 and it shows drying just like NCEP. So why are these other datasets so hidden? they would be smoking guns in the positive water vapor feedback controversy.  Thanks again for your assistance. This is at the root of the climate sensitivity issue. I wish it was easier to find said data.  That is the main reason why I started this topic....

You can get some re-analysis data from KNMI climate explorer, including NCEP.  ERA5 is the most recent re-analysis product and it looks like 200+300 mb humidity is available at KNMI.  RSS has satellite total column water vapor, which is increasing as expected.

Water vapor feedback is very well established in climate models and observations. The feedback is well explained by basic thermodynamic theory (below).

https://journals.ametsoc.org/jcli/article/27/19/7432/34587/An-Analytical-Model-for-Tropical-Relative-Humidity

5 hours ago, blizzard1024 said:

why does the upper tropospheric specific humidity fall on the NVAP and upper air sounding data? They just swept this under the rug. I want to see specific humidities and also compare it to ENSO.  Are you saying NCEP/NOAA is unreliable?  climate4you  is taking their datasets. 

Yes, NCEP is unreliable vs other re-analysis products. This was established 10 years ago, yet climate4you continues to display the unreliable data.  I don't trust any chart from that site.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2010JD014192

Below is upper troposphere humidity (UTH) chart from recently released AMS state of the climate report. As expected, relative humidity in the upper troposphere is flat, indicating an increase in water vapor since temperatures are increasing.  Many of the charts on the "climate4you" site are bad data or misleading.

https://www.ametsoc.org/index.cfm/ams/publications/bulletin-of-the-american-meteorological-society-bams/state-of-the-climate/

37 minutes ago, bdgwx said:

Clearly there are circumstances that are causing the PHL site to warm but not the Chester County site. There could be various reasons for this including the obvious urban heat island effect. While most urban sites are no longer experiencing significant increases in urban heating there are, of course, many location (both in the US and worldwide) that are.

Scientists who develop and maintain datasets that publish a global mean surface temperature (GMST) are well aware of the urban heat island effect and take necessary steps to make sure it is not biasing the warming trends either way. It is also a very misunderstood topic by laypeople. Many people have the mistaken belief that the UHI effect on the GMST warming trend can only ever be positive and is always increasing. This couldn't be further from the truth.  

Berkeley Earth did an analysis a few years ago and determined that the UHI effect may actually be biasing global mean surface warming trends too low for the post-WWII era, albeit by a small amount.

"We observe the opposite of an urban heating effect over the period 1950 to 2010, with a slope of -0.10 ± 0.24°C/100yr (2σ error) in the Berkeley Earth global land temperature average."

 

There is no way to isolate an urban heat island effect from Chesco's plot because he has inappropriately combined different stations into a single record for comparison to the Philadelphia airport.  Per the chart below, the pre-1950 data from Coatesville ( a steel town) has a warm bias. Also the Coatesville data are collected at a site that is further south and lower elevation than the post-1983 data. The second chart below shows that Chesco's recent data (C2WKQMS+E Nant) are warming at roughly the same rate as the Philadelphia airport (phl) and the region as a whole.